Since last year, my conversations with my children has gradually changed. Entering teenage years, our baby gloves are gradually falling off. For me, this is parenting level 500. Some conversations are pretty easy and I allow my child lead with questions based on their level of understanding e.g. around biology, sexual education and reproductive matters, friendships or quarreling with a friend at school.
My hardest conversations turns out to be the unexpected ones, sometimes after an unhappy incident. Perhaps because they are upset, or because I know I have to teach my kids about the imbalance of this world and trying to navigate it, while trying to still protect them from said imbalance. Questions around racism, disability, death and dying, migration, foster care, the need for learning (not just being education), looking for home to rent, war, et..c. They ask and I don't brush them off as ‘just kids’.
So when I read this article 'What Kids Learn From Hard Conversations', it didn't surprise me to read about a Sudanese woman talking about telling her kids her migration story as a refugee. When we move from our home and country, we build resilience and we pass that resilience to our kids through our actions, words and parenting. My kids say my stories can fill a telenovela show. I tell them the truth about life but with lots of age-appropriateness. It was hard starting this aspect of parenting, to speak truth and share my own life lessons as a way of teaching them values, but as time goes on, it got easier and they are listening.
Things are real to them when it is your story, not some abstract fiction.
Today, one asked about dating. I told why him it's too early, need to focus on studies, our culture as Nigerians and we ended it with laughs about grandpa stories with life-correcting date-canceling #koboko
I wonder if we were still in Nigeria, I might have been more slower in doing this, but that luxury became less possible once we migrated. There is no right or wrong, there is no perfection. There is only you and your child(ren) and the world you create for them.
Bình luận